Kelly McNeill got spammed by the Zahariev’s.

He’s running post-Nuke, which isn’t too easily cleaned at the moment. Understandably, he got irritated, so he sent (a very polite) e-mail to the support address at Moniker, their registrar.

And was very confused when he received a reply from Doris Young at tqiopi@yahoo.com. Magnetic Ink once sent an e-mail to the whois contact of one of the domains and got a reply from the same Doris Young, at the same Israeli IP address. She offered to have him removed from their list.

What confused Kelly, was that the quoted text was from the e-mail sent to the registrar. Although he’d sent one e-mail to the spammer, it was different. We did some investigation, and the message ID of the message she replied to was from an e-mail sent to Moniker.

So what happened? You’ll excuse Kelly for believing the worst just about then. I tend to look for less dramatic possible explanations, and found one ..possible:

When you bounce forward a message to a new recipient, the original message ID is preserved (at least my results show that), and the message that’s sent hardly shows any signs of having been received by someone else first. That option isn’t present in all mail programs (I haven’t seen it in Outlook Express), so we probably don’t see much of it these days. But it’s still in use in some programs, and probably by some early adopters (it was an easily accessible feature of Eudora 9 years ago).

So, barring any more …spectacular explanations, Moniker just bounce forwarded the abuse complaint to the spammer instead of even acknowledging having received the mail.

You see, Kelly, smelling a rat, called Moniker and demanded an explanation. And was told they’d never received that e-mail.

Hmmm, something to think about next time you write abuse…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2005 at 9:19 am and is filed under Forum spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.